Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

“Maybe,” he said, though he felt funny saying it and was not sure why.

Back at the Sea View apartments, they climbed the stairs and he stood with her in front of her door. The door was open and inside he could see Jill sprawled on the couch, still clothed. Michelle looked in at her roommate then back at Ike. She wrinkled her nose and smiled. “You could come in,” she said. “I have my own corner. Or do you have to go to work?”

Ike stood looking into the small cluttered room. “I lied. I have to go to bed. I’m really tired right now.”

“Will you surf with them sometime?”

He shrugged.

She stood with her back to the door, her hand resting on the knob. He looked at her and he could see she was waiting, that he was expected to do something besides say good night. He would have liked that as well. There was an odd kind of charged moment as her eyes held his in which he might have moved toward her, touched her, but he allowed it to pass, or rather he waited too long so that to have gone to her would have seemed awkward and clumsy. He turned back toward his own door, and then turned to face her again from a safer distance. “Maybe we could do something tomorrow,” he said. “Go to a show or something.”

“Okay,” she said. “Come by after I get home from work.” She waved at him and he waved back.

Once in his room, he sat on the bed and thought back over the evening. As he undressed he kept thinking about those questions Hound Adams had asked him. The questions implied a certain amount of knowledge on Hound’s part, and yet Ike had the impression that he was fishing a bit too. What did Hound Adams know? And what about that offer to come to the shop? It was a tricky proposition, he thought, no matter how you looked at it.

Ike did not feel very refreshed when he finally got out of bed. He showered and decided to go for a walk downtown. The shower made him feel better and there was a good breeze off the ocean. He walked by the Curl Theater to check out the movies. He thought maybe Michelle would want to see a surf movie with him. He had never taken a girl out before. It made him feel strange, a little nervous. He still could not get over how different Michelle seemed to him after the party. Jill had been there too and had seemed a lot more like her old self, loud and dumb. But Michelle had been different. He suddenly found himself trying to imagine what it would be like to have a real girl friend—a wife, even. He tried to imagine himself driving a station wagon full of boogie boards and sandy kids down Coast Highway on a Sunday afternoon. He tried, but he couldn’t quite do it. As far as he knew, no one in his family had turned out normal yet and he didn’t see why he should be the first.

The Curl was a crusty-looking old building with peeling paint, bordered on both sides by vacant lots. It ran surf films nearly every week. This week it had one called Standing Room Only . He stood for a while examining the posters before deciding they should go. Then he walked down to the Del Taco, where Michelle worked, to get a Coke.

She seemed surprised to see him. He’d never been there when she was working. She was wearing an orange and brown uniform with a little white name tag pinned over her breast. He hung around the counter for a while, sipping his Coke from a straw and talking to her. When he told her about the movie, she said, “Far out.”

All the time he was talking to her, he kept noticing this other girl, about Michelle’s age, staring at him. She was working the drive-thru window, but she kept looking over at Ike, staring at him like she was trying to decide if she knew him or not. Ike had never seen her before in his life. He met her stare a couple of times and each time she looked away. He would have hung around awhile longer. It was pleasant enough to stand there, talking to Michelle, the wind at his back, but finally some people started to line up behind him and so he said good-bye. “I’ll see you tonight,” she told him. “It will be fun.” Ike walked down the steps to the sidewalk and then turned to look back. Michelle smiled at him through the glass. Behind her, he could see that the girl at the drive-thru was looking at him again.

He made two stops on his way back up Main Street. He stopped first at the travel agency and picked up some maps of Mexico. He wanted to see if he could remember the names and trace out the same lines that Hound Adams had drawn the night before. And then he went on to the Main Street Surf Shop.

He did not see Hound Adams. In fact he did not see anyone and the shop, as it had been on his first visit, was empty and quiet. He pushed his fingers into the pockets of his jeans and walked inside. He was not really certain what he had come to see. He supposed it had something to do with what Barbara had told him, that the shop had once belonged to Preston.

In tennis shoes, he moved silently across the dark rectangle of carpet in the showroom and onto the concrete. It was odd, the silence in the shop, giving him the sensation that any loud noises would be out of place. That feeling was enhanced, he guessed, by the memorabilia on the walls, the trophies and old posters, the faded photographs, some of which had writing across the bottoms of the mattings in which they were framed. He paid closer attention to what was around him now than he had on his first visit and he noticed one thing right away, was surprised in fact that he had not remembered it from his first visit. On the deck of one of the old balsa wood boards that hung suspended from the ceiling, he saw a decal. The ceiling in the shop was high, as if the room had once served another purpose, but he could easily make out the shape of the decal: a flaming wave within a circle. He began to study some of the photographs and he saw that there were other boards in the photographs with the same decal, the logo repeated perhaps a dozen times throughout the pictures.

The shop consisted of two rooms. There was the large room with the carpet and the raised ceiling in front and another smaller room in back where the used boards and wet suits were kept. Ike walked into the back portion of the shop. He smelled the distinctive rubbery odor of the new wet suits, the sharp, rather sweet scent of fresh resin. It was on the wall above the wet suits at the east end of the small room that he found what was to him the most remarkable of the photographs. It was an enlargement done on what looked to be a cheap paper, for the picture had once been in color but was now faded and full of light. The sky was the palest of blues and the color was completely gone from the faces of the people: a middle-aged man, two younger men, and a girl. It took Ike a moment or two to be certain, but certain he was, even before finding the very thin, spidery handwriting that traveled along the photo’s bottom edge: the two young men were Hound Adams and Preston Marsh. They both had short haircuts, were dressed in swimsuits and matching sweat shirts. They stood propped against an old Ford station wagon with wood on the sides and surfboards protruding from the back. The girl was between them, standing on the running board, one arm over Hound’s shoulders, the other over Preston’s. She was a very good-looking girl with fine curved brows, a straight nose, and even teeth, a face that might have been in the movies, and she was smiling, laughing almost. Preston and Hound were smiling.

The middle-aged man did not seem to fit with the others somehow. He was dressed in slacks and a T-shirt. A sport coat hung draped over one arm. His hair was very short and dark, combed straight back, and he wore a pair of small round shades. His mouth was thin, straight, turned up at the corners in what might have been a smile. The writing across the bottom said: Mexico, Labor Day, 1965. Hound, Preston, Janet, Milo .